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372

Norman Millet Thomas Engraving of Wolf

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:10.00 USD Estimated At:50.00 - 75.00 USD
Norman Millet Thomas Engraving of Wolf
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Nice engraving. Needs to be reset in the frame. 16.5" by 19.5" framed. Norman Millet Thomas was known for modernist animal and abstract figure painting, murals, etching, and sculpture. There are few US artists from the twentieth century whose artistic diversity and breadth of life experience can rival that of Norman Thomas. His accomplishments ranged from Pulitzer Scholarship, to combat artist during World War II, publication in Life magazine, sculptor for the US Coast Guard War Memorial, producer of a 1961 film banned by the Mexican Government, and influential member of Studio 88 in California. His friends and circle included Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and David Siqueiros. Norman Millet Thomas was drawn to work with murals from early in his life, and in 1938 he was awarded a Pulitzer traveling scholarship of $1,500. for a mural of a lobster fisherman on the back shore of Long Island, Maine. Thomas graduated from Portland High School in 1933, studied art at the Portland School of Fine Arts, then the National Academy of Design in New York City, and the American Academy in Rome, Italy. He served as a combat artist for the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II. Five wartime paintings by Thomas were published in Life magazine September 6, 1943 under the heading of "Greenland at War". Thomas also sketched the amphibious assaults at Leyte and Luzon in the Philippines, and Iwo Jima, Japan. His sketches of Luzon and particularly of two Coast Guardsmen supporting between them a wounded soldier became the design for the Coast Guard War Memorial. Thomas designed and sculpted the bronze statue for the War Memorial at Battery Park in New York City. The memorial was dedicated in 1955, and a replica was dedicated in Baltimore in 1959. Thomas's murals have embraced a wide range of topics and been put to many uses. He is well known as the artist of the Norbert Capek Mural (http://www.essexuu.org/nmtmural.html ), which was unveiled March 16, 1947. It may have been the use of this media to convey and portray oppression that reinforced Thomas's association with Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros. Thomas's paintings such as Man of War also share much in common with Siqueiros's later paintings. While in Cuernavaca, Mexico in the 1960s and early 1970s Siqueiros and Thomas both experimented with modern paint media. Thomas's paintings also often included a lot of texture. Thomas's later years were spent mostly in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He was a producer of the 1961 film El Brazo Fuerte by Giovanni Korporaal, which was banned in Mexico because it criticized government corruption. Thomas spent time living in Mexico intermittently in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. But in the 1950s Thomas shared a studio in Portland, Maine with William T. Wray and Claude Montgomery. Then from about 1965 to 1970 he was in Los Gatos, California, and became part of the group of artists who gathered at the nearby Studio 88 in Campbell. Studio 88 in the late 60's early 70's was also a hangout for artists Duane Armstrong, Steve Sutton, Don Heitkotter and Paul Greenesmith. Thomas was born in 1915 and grew up in Portland, Maine. He married Maryjane Ripley in 1941, and they had a son named Peter. He then lived with his second wife Rebeca Duff de Salinas in Cuernavaca, and they had a daughter named Leonora. He died at Cuernavaca, Mexico on May 11, 1986 at the age of 70, and in keeping with the diversity of his life his ashes were returned to his birthplace of Portland and as befitted Norman Thomas as the mariner they were scattered over Casco Bay.
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